DUCK FAMILY ROBINSON

The last few mornings I’ve hit the Cedar River bike Trail I’ve noticed two things: a) the trees are greening out more and more each day, and may be fully green by April 5^th, as they were last year, and b) there is a pair of ducks that have been hanging out right next to the Trail.

I first saw the pair of ducks two days ago. They were waddling about, running their beaks through the grasses, probably eating bugs and slugs. As anyone who has had ducks knows, ducks love to eat slugs! If you have a vegetable or flower garden, and you want a natural way to get rid of slugs, a duck or two will do the job!

Picture of female duck resting by the side of the Cedar River Trail

Plus, ducks are fun! They have a lot of personality. I know, because when I was a kid, we had some ducks. Seeing the female Mallard this morning reminded me of one of the ducks we used to have back then -- a duck we raised from a wild duckling.

When I was a kid, my dad used to go over by the local golf course and collect the golf balls that would be knocked into the creek -- the golf balls would flow down the creek, to be trapped by the small weir, which is where my father would collect them. The small weir was a trap, located right in front of a culvert that took the creek under the highway.

One afternoon my dad told me to go over and get a baby duck that was caught in the weir. He said it looked scared and was chirping and struggling and was trying to get out of the water, but couldn't. My dad couldn’t catch the duckling himself, because his hands were full of golf balls.

I went over and there the little guy was – chirping and chirping (ducks chirp when they’re little ducklings) and flapping his wings, scared – trying to get out from the mini-waterfall created by the weir.

I reached down and scooped up the little guy, and took him home. We put him in a pen inside the house with a light, and gave him chicken mash (a type of chicken food that is all mashed up and easy for ducks to eat). The duckling grew and grew, and in time he turned out to be a she! A female mallard we named Quackers.

We had a small pond we had made from concrete. Naturally, my mom made me do all the digging, and we both did the concrete work. It turned out to be a decent pond, and Quackers would get in the pond and quack and quack and quack and swim around contentedly.

Every afternoon when I got home from school, and when my parents got home from work, there was Quackers, moving back and forth on the back patio, quacking and quacking and muttering and moving her head up and down – making a general racket, wanting to be fed.

Quackers was the life of the back yard. We had a small dog which never bothered her. The dog never bothered the other birds we had in our back yard at the time (2-3 hens), either.

One day Quackers disappeared. We looked all over for her. About a week later my father told me he had found her. A new family had moved in to the house behind our fence, and their big dogs had gotten loose and killed Quackers. My father told me not to tell my mom, because she would have been heartbroken. I was angry about it. The neighbors left within a couple months.

Every time I hear a female Mallard duck laughing or quacking, I think of Quackers.

I don’t have any photos of Quackers, but I do have an old photo of a mother duck we had a couple years later that had a bunch of ducklings. My mother demanded I take the photo at the time. Now I’m glad I did. Back then, the back yard was full of life. When I first saw Quackers struggling and chirping in the little waterfall, she looked just like the baby ducks in the picture above.

To return to the original point of this post: the ducks by the Trail. 

I call them the Duck Family Robinson. They seem to have a nest somewhere just off the Trail. This morning I only saw the female, so I photographed her. She was sitting on the gravel, only two or three feet from the pavement. As it was very early in the morning, there were no other animals or people to bother her (dogs sometimes will run after the ducks if the owners do not have them leashed, or if the ducks are too close to the Trail).

I got two photos of her. She looks a lot like Quackers.  One photo is posted near the top of this post. This photo above is more of a close up. She let me get within 15 ft. or so on my bike, without flinching.

I suppose that during this morning the male Mallard was near the eggs. I think that the duck nest is possibly in the blackberries somewhere off the edge of the Trail, or maybe in the tall grasses by the grove of alder trees on the opposite side (the trees in the right side of the very top photo in this post).

I know that as I continue to ride the Trail this Spring, I will continue to keep an eye out for the Duck Family Robinson.